Nonetheless, these young girls fill this grave house with charming souvenirs. At certain hours childhood sparkled in that cloister. The recreation hour strikes. A door swings on its hinges. The birds say, Good, here come the children. An irruption of youth inundates that garden intersected with a cross like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads, innocent eyes, full of merry light, all sorts of auroras, are scattered about amid these shadows. After the psalmodies, the bells, the peals, and knells and offices, the sound of these little girls bursts forth on a sudden more sweetly than the noise of bees. The hive of joy is opened, and each one brings her honey. They play, they call to each other, they form into groups, they run about. Pretty little white teeth chatter in the corners. The veils superintend the laughs from a distance. Shades keep watch of the sunbeams, but what mattered it? Still they beam and laugh. Those four lugubrious walls have their moment of dazzling brilliancy. It is like a shower of roses falling athwart this house of mourning. The young girls frolic beneath the eyes of the nuns. The gaze of impeccability does not embarrass innocence. Thanks to these children, there is, among so many austere hours, one hour of ingenuousness. The little ones skip about. The elder ones dance. In this cloister play is mingled with heaven. Nothing is so delightful and so august as all these fresh, expanding young souls. Homer would have come thither to laugh with Perrault. There is in that black garden youth, health, noise, cries, giddiness, pleasure, happiness enough to smooth out the wrinkles of all their ancestresses, those of the epic as well as those of the fairy-tale.
In that house more than anywhere else, perhaps, arise those children's sayings which are so graceful and which evoke a smile that is full of thoughtfulness. It was between those four gloomy walls that a child of five years exclaimed one day, Mother, one of the big girls has just told me that I have only nine years and ten months longer to remain here. What happiness. It was here, too, that a vocal mother asked a child of six why she was weeping. The child had told Alix that she knew her French history. Alix, aged nine, had opened the book at random, as proposed, and put the first question she came across. The question was, What happened after that? It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that there was once picked up a confession written out in advance by a sinner of seven years: Father, I accuse myself of having been avaricious, of having been an adulteress, of having raised my eyes to the gentlemen. It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent was bringing up out of charity, heard the others talking of their mothers, and murmured in her corner, As for me, my mother was not there when I was born.
There is a stout portress hurrying through the corridors with her bunch of keys, Sister Agatha, whom the girls over ten call Agathocles. The refectory is dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. Each of its four corners has received a special name: Spider corner, Caterpillar corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner. Cricket corner is near the kitchen and is highly esteemed. It is not so cold there. From the refectory the names have passed to the boarding-school, and serve to distinguish four nations. Every pupil belongs to one of these four nations according to the corner in which she sits at meals. One day the Archbishop, making his pastoral visit, sees a pretty little rosy girl with golden hair. He inquires of a charming brunette who stands near him, Who is that? She is a spider, Monseigneur. And that one yonder? She is a cricket. And that one? She is a caterpillar. And yourself? I am a wood-louse, Monseigneur. Every house of this sort has its own peculiarities. At Ecouen, in order to take rank in the procession of the Holy Sacrament, a distinction was made between virgins and florists. On the morning of that great day it was no rare thing to hear the question put in the dormitory, Who is a virgin? Madame Campan used to quote this saying of a little one of seven years, to a big girl of sixteen, who took the head of the procession, while she, the little one, remained at the rear: You are a virgin, but I am not.
